Oddities and profundities from Fitz!

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Life on NBC

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Hi all…

With the writer’s strike in full swing, I thought it would be a good time to write about some of my favorite shows of the season. I’ve already written about Reaper , K*Ville, and the Bionic Woman. But now I’d like to add Life to the list… “Life was his sentence. Life is what he got back.” You can see more at the NBC site and even watch entire episodes online.

To sum it up… Charlie Crews (played brilliantly by Damian Lewis) was a cop sent to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. After years in prison, he is released by close friend and attorney Constance Griffiths (played by Brooke Langton), and returns to the police force where he’s not really wanted. His new partner, Dani Reese, played Sarah Shahi (who I didn’t remember until I looked in IMDB that she was in a Supernatural episode as well as some other series), is a skeptic and recovering addict/alcoholic. And his money manager, Ted Earley (played by the always great Adam Arkin), manages the money Crews got in the settlement, which is an undisclosed sum of some millions. And Crews must try and figure out who framed him for the murder while on the job as a police detective.

Crews discovered Zen Buddhism while in prison and that figures prominently in his interactions with folks, as does his addiction to fruit which has yet to be explained but has been fun. The Zen philosophy of Crews and the skeptical attitude of Reese make it a very interesting buddy cop show. Neither character is flawless by any stretch of the imagination, and those flaws are readily apparent.

The stories are interesting, sometimes covering harsh topics like alcoholism and rape like they did in the recent episode “Powerless”. And at other times amusing, like in the pilot when Crews asks some uniformed cops if they’d talked to the dog at the crime scene. It’s the little things that make you laugh sometimes, but the Zen is there to make you think too.

So I encourage folks to give it a shot. Hopefully it will survive the writer’s strike like several of my other favorites!